Has God Changed His Stripes — E.A. Johnston

God's Immutability in Malachi

In the book of Malachi, in chapter 3 and verse 6, the great God of the Bible speaks and makes a statement about Himself, and this is what He declares, For I am the Lord, I change not. This speaks of His immutability.

Divine Constancy in Hebrews

We see this same doctrine of the immutability and divine constancy in Hebrews chapter 1 in verses 10 through 12. Let me read that to us now, friends. And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thine hands.

They shall perish, but thou remainest, and they all shall wax old as doth the garment, and as the vesture shall be changed, but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail. We don't hear much about the doctrine of immutability today, friends, but it's true, God has not changed His stripes to keep up with the moral downgrade in the church and in society.

God is still the same God He was yesterday, if you don't believe me, just read Hebrews chapter 13 and verse 8, which speaks of the divine constancy. Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever, but most folks don't believe in that kind of God.

They believe that God has changed into a more updated version to keep up with society's changes. They believe that God is a supreme being of only love, and that this love God would never send anybody to hell because of sin.

The God of the Bible Versus Human Conceptions

Most pastors today preach a different God than the one found in my Bible, friends. It's as if most folks today have gotten out their pocket knives and have carved out for themselves a God they are comfortable with, a God they can live with, a God that's just like them, a God that thinks like them, and acts like they would act, but in Isaiah we see that God is not like man at all.

In Isaiah 55, 8 and 9, He declares, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways, my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

But still, the majority of the people on this planet think that the God of today has changed His stripes to be a more politically correct God, and a God who'd never punish sin. That's what folks think.

If you don't believe me, just go out and talk to them. Ask them how they view God, that is, if they believe in a God at all. The title of my message this evening, friends, is, Has God Changed His Stripes?

And the answer is no, He has not. The God of the Bible says, For I am the Lord, I change not. But even though God has not changed, the church has. The church is not the same entity as it was 60 years ago.

The Church's Altered Gospel and Loss of Prayer

The church of today has let the world in. It's killed off the only source of power it had, and that was the weekly prayer meeting. The church of today has altered her view, her view of God, shrunken Him down, down to man's level.

And the church of today has changed the entire gospel message to make it more palatable to sinful man. God hasn't changed, but the church has changed. The church doesn't even look the same anymore, friends.

The church has changed her view of God, and the message of the Son of God. That's a fact, folks. Whether you agree with me or not, you go do what I do, and visit around churches, and listen to what pastors have to say in regard to God in the Bible, and you'll hear about a God who's nothing like the one found in my Bible.

The gospel message you will hear won't even be a gospel message at all, but a diluted substitute that has no power to save a flea, much less a devil-deluded, hell-bound sinner. Most pastors today do not have a clue how to present the full counsel of God in a gospel presentation to where it shuts up the sinner to a holy God in conviction of sin.

We've got the blind leading the blind today, and both falling to a ditch. It's sad, it's tragic, but it's a sign of the times. Christ is coming back, and when he does, he's going to roll up this old world like a dirty carpet and throw it in the fire and burn it.

God's Judgment on Sin

That's what it says in my Bible, as found in 2 Peter 3, verse 7. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word, are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

God's going to consume this world, friends, and everything in it by fire, just like he destroyed the old world by flood the first time. Do you know why he's going to do that, friends? Because God is a God who must punish sin.

Even if most folks today think that God has changed his stripes, I can assure you that God is a God who must punish sin. Turn in your Bibles to 2 Peter 2, and we will explore this theme of the unchanging God who is the same today as he was in the Old Testament times.

Listen, friend, how you view God will impact how you view yourself, how you view sin, if your view of God is low, then your view of sin will be low. You will tolerate sin in your life and still call yourself a Christian because you think God has changed his stripes, and he won't punish sin like he did in former times.

But let's see what old Peter has to say on this subject, as seen in chapter 2 and verses 4 -9. Let me read us this striking passage of scripture now, and read about a God who's not changed his stripes.

Here now is the word of God. May the Spirit of the Lord be pleased to attend the reading of his holy word. For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment, and spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly, and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, making them an example unto those that after should live ungodly, and delivered justly, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked.

For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds, the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished.

The Unchanging God and Evangelistic Urgency

Now friends, I believe for the church at this hour that it is critically important that we adjust our view of God to the immutable God of the Bible, that we realign ourselves to the reality of the constancy of God.

The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New. He changeth not. God is still a God who will and must punish sin. Oh friends, if we're going to grab hold of that fact, it would change the way we evangelize.

We would live in urgency to get in front of lost sinners so we could tell them about a Savior who came down here so we could go up there. I want to take time now to read us part of a chapter of my biography on the life of Rolf Barnard because it deals with our theme this evening on an unchanging God who must punish sin.

I want to read us this story in the life of Rolf Barnard because if we could preach about the God that Barnard preached and proclaim the gospel that Barnard proclaimed, and if we began to preach the law and shut lost sinners up to God and God alone for salvation, somebody just might get under conviction of sin.

Somebody just might come up to us, tug on our coat sleeve and ask, what must I do to be saved? When was the last time you heard that question posed to you, friend? It's because we've changed the gospel message.

We've changed our view of God, and we've changed the way we reach the lost in your day and mine, and very few are getting saved today, friends. Very few. Very few can even hear a full presentation of the true gospel.

Rolf Barnard on Whether God Punishes Sin

This is why I want to take time now, friends, to read us a sermon extract from Rolf Barnard entitled Judgment's Coming, or Should God Punish Sin? Here now are the words of evangelist Rolf Barnard. If sin is damning its thousands, religion today is damning its tens of thousands.

Some years ago, I was invited to the largest church in a Baptist association. They had a daily radio program, and God's Spirit came upon the radio broadcast. God gave us quite a harvest, a little blessing from God.

A day or two before those meetings were over, the pastor of the church called me up at the hotel and said, there is a committee representing the Baptist preachers of this association, and they want to come down and talk to you in the hotel.

And they came and said, we represent this association and we're authorized to come and extend to you an invitation to come back a year hence and hold a meeting for all our churches combined. We'll put you up a giant tent and get our churches in.

We want you to give that invitation, but before you give us your answer, we have two conditions. We want you to come and we'll get you an hour's time on the radio every day, and then we'll have a big tent.

We'll guarantee you'll be full every night. We'll go after people if you promise us that you will just preach on one subject while you were here on the radio for an hour and in the tent at night. We'd like to know if you could find it in your heart.

After you go home and think about it and pray about it, you just let us know if you would come and just preach on one subject. And that subject is, will God punish sin? That's what those pastors told me.

You see folks, most everybody in America is a church member, but they don't think that God will punish sin. They don't let their church membership interfere with their daily living because they don't believe God will punish sin.

You talk to them about Jesus dying on the cross and they're not interested because they don't believe God will punish sin. And nobody ever will be interested in whether Christ did anything on the cross that would do me any good or not till you believe that God will punish sin.

Well amen I told them, I'll agree to that. Then they said, we don't want you to give any kind of a public invitation. Now that's strange for us Baptists for we don't think you can get saved unless the preacher invites you.

But we've filled our churches full of folks who wouldn't know the Lord from a grasshopper. They just responded to some sort of invitation. Well I listened to those Baptist preachers. It was right down my alley because I'm so tired of begging people to come to Jesus when they don't feel like they need him.

Well the time came and I went every day for an hour on the radio and at night under the tent I became an authority on what God says about God will punish sin. I preached everything I could find in the Bible and there was plenty of it.

And after I would get through preaching every night I would say goodnight go on to hell. Well that's where you seem to want to go. That was my benediction. Now that's pretty rough isn't it? Well that's a little different from saying oh won't you take Jesus?

They don't want him anyway and Jesus isn't found that way anyhow. On Thursday night of the fourth week I was just preaching up away and a man way back there got up and came running down the sawdust trail and came up on the platform.

He pushed me aside and said for God's sake preacher I've got to say something. He was president of the biggest bank in that city. He was a teacher in the Sunday school and deacon of a church and he had stolen $250 ,000 from that bank and nobody knew it.

He got to listening to me on the radio and got to worrying about that and then he got to coming to hear me preach under the tent. All I would say God has gone to punish sin I can prove it. He always has.

He's doing it now and he's going to do it. First Timothy chapter 5 and verse 24 says it. Some man's sins are opened beforehand going before the judgment and some man they follow after and this man got in a terrible shape.

His little Sunday school teaching wouldn't help him. You know that won't save a man. The fact that he was a deacon that wouldn't save him. The fact that he was president of the bank that wouldn't take care of it either and it got to where he would come hear me preach and he would go home at night and lock his door, get out his Bible, get down on his knees and he would just beg God to have mercy on him and save him and that $250 ,000 would come up before him.

There's no way on earth you can do business with God without coming clean with him. The whole outfit has got to come out. Yes sir, he just couldn't get God to trade with him at all and he got so miserable that the day before he came and interrupted my sermon he wrote a letter and put it in the mail and admitted that he'd stolen $250 ,000 from the bank and got in touch with the chief of police and the powers that ran the bank.

There were some policemen there in the congregation waiting to arrest him that night and he knew it. He came up on the platform and confessed his awful sin and then he just fell down like a sack of sugar and sobbed like his heart would break.

He looked up through his tears after a while and said, is there anybody that can pray for an old sinner like me? I saw several thousand people under that big tent, saints and lost people, hell rousers and everybody else.

They just fell on their knees on that sawdust and begged God to have mercy on that old sinner who brought his sin out in the open and came clean before God and God was pleased to have mercy on him and saved him.

They arrested him and tried him and sent him to the penitentiary. That was in 1951 and he's been in that penitentiary ever since. I get a letter once a month from him. I have for all these years. He's the happiest prison inmate you ever saw.

He's been in prison all these years but bless God there ain't no prison like sin that binds us. It's a lot better to spend the rest of his life in prison and spend eternity in hell. We went on three more weeks in that meeting.

People would go to work and go to the foreman and say, I can't work and they'd come to the tent for three weeks. All we did was pray with and counsel men and women coming and saying, could it be that God would have mercy on me?

Warning Sinners That Judgment Is Coming

That is the testimony and witness that must not be confined to this pulpit, but it must burn in your heart until with a zeal that cannot be consumed, your lips are open, your tears calm, your heart enlarges, and whether anybody hears you or not, moving with fear, you will warn people that judgment is coming and God will punish sin.

Well, friends, I like that story by Rolf Barnard, don't you? Oh, dear friends, if only we, if only we preachers would stop soft soaking our congregations with the watered down gospel, if we would only once again believe in the living God of the Bible and preach what he has to say about himself, that he is a God who changes not.

He is a God who must judge and punish sin. And if we did that, oh, well, just maybe like that bank president, a poor sinner hearing us would get under conviction of sin and come running down the aisle, throw themselves on their knees and cry out, what must I do to be saved?

God has not changed his stripes, friend, we have. It's time to get back to the God of the Bible and preach the true gospel of the son of God and the cry out of that message that there is a common judgment and there is a God, a God who must and will punish sin.

Let us pray.